The Exeter Road: the story of the west of England highway

by Charles G. Harper

One comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of Bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby grass, gorse, and fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that perhaps originated the place-name, ‘Beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck. The many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in Hants and Surrey have this common origin, and are similarly situated in the little hollows watered by descending brooks.

Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘King’s Arms.’

The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on the west of Bagshot village, was once a peat moor. Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up there. Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath the black sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very hard iron rust, or thin stratum of oxide of iron, which prevents drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything will grow here.

There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of Bagshot an old inn called the ‘Jolly Farmer.’ This is the successor of a still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of William Davis, the notorious ‘Golden Farmer,’ who lived here in the century before last.

The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable practice of paying his bills in gold. He was never known to tender cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. But respect at last fell from Mr. William Davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.

THE ‘GOLDEN FARMER’

Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted space before the entrance to the ‘King’s Arms,’ when the gossips of the place recognised in him the well-known features of the ‘Golden Farmer.’ A ferocious Government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery, caused the ‘Golden Farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his own threshold.

The present inn, an ugly building facing down the road, does not occupy the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going westwards. A table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour of the ‘Jolly Farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. A tall obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads here—where the signpost is standing nowadays—has long since disappeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. A still existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘Claude du Vail’s Cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some distance along Lightwater Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with commonplace slates.

Almost immediately after leaving the ‘Jolly Farmer’ behind, the road grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of Cambridge Town Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where one of these modern squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.